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CthulhuCon 2015 – Poster Art

For the last few years I’ve been attending the Lovecraft Film Festival here in Portland and have wanted to contribute my art to their campaign, whether it be poster art, or something else they could use to promote the festival. During the first year I had my piece, “The Innsmouth Look” shown on the big screen along with dozens of others’ art – and while that was pretty cool I definitely had my sights set higher.

So, I approached the organizer, offered my services and was given the opportunity to create the poster art for CthulhuCon 2015! I started by creating some mockups, or quick sketches to get an overall direction.

The sketches were created in Sketchbook Pro, and after the direction was figured out I went right into modeling Cthulhu in Zbrush periodically rendering out tests to figure out composition.

I then created a preliminary render test, adding colors and the background to get a better idea of the end result. This is where I ended up after about 2 hours of work. I really like how turned out, the atmosphere is foreboding and the subsurface scattering while wildly excessive turned out great. This initial test was low resolution and not print quality, so I rendered everything out again…

Like my previous illustrations I rendered out various passes using Zbrush’s BPR render feature then layered the passes in photoshop using a variety of blending modes. The color was added in Photoshop, as well as the background (from NASA photography) and effects. Finally, I added a little chromatic aberration to create an other worldly feeling.

Here is the final poster! My work was also featured in an article for Oregon Live!